Dohee Lee's "ARA Gut" (ocean ritual) program emanates from her native Jeju Island of South Korea. She wears masks and costumes, including that of Mago, Jeju Island's creator goddess, but she says the themes she expresses are universal.

South Korea's Jeju Island has a rich tradition of shamanism - but growing up there, Dohee Lee didn't know this. Her father was in the South Korean military. The family relocated to a base on the mainland when Lee was 7. Lee's Christian parents didn't want her to learn about the shamans, who act as intermediaries between human beings and the spirits; they didn't even want their daughter to dance, so Lee took classes in secret until age 16.

"Finally I said to my parents, 'If you do not accept who I am, I'm going to die,' " Lee said recently. "Then they listened."

Lee's fierce drive to be herself is inseparable, it seems, from her intensely empathetic way of being with others. At a cafe near her home on Oakland's Lake Merritt, her long black hair in a braid, she gazed across the table with a mixture of calm pain and curiosity. This is the gaze she brings to her ritual performances, the latest of which, "ARA Gut," will unfold over eight hours (visitors may come and go at will) throughout the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this Saturday.

"The first thing that hits me is seeing the people - afraid to cry, afraid of screaming, afraid of their emotions," Lee said. "I want them to feel it is not shameful, it is OK to feel these things. I do that through my body. I become the instrument and let the people there play me." On Saturday, after asking each visitor to name an ancestor, Lee will take the feelings she has channeled and let them escape through her powerfully responsive voice and her bold movement, as four musical collaborators on percussion, flutes, and electronics join her improvisation. "When I am singing, something touches inside that opens up," she said. "Afterward I am relieved, and something is released."

Lee will do all of this wearing various masks and costumes, including that of Mago, Jeju Island's creator goddess. In fact, "ARA Gut" ("ara" means "ocean," and "gut" means "ritual"), is part of a larger work titled "Mago," which Lee began during a residency at Marin's Headlands Center for the Arts, continued through a commission from the Other Minds Festival, and will complete this November, after two months of research on Jeju Island. Her initial impetus was an intuition of the pain suffered both at Headlands during its decades as a missionary and military base and on Jeju Island, where political insurrections and genocide terrorized the inhabitants in the late '40s and '50s.

And though Lee will channel these histories through the Shamanic practices of Korea - which she has taught at the Korean Youth Cultural Center and the Oakland Asian Cultural Center since arriving here 11 years ago - the specific traditions, she says, "are not the point."

"The sound and the costumes come from Korean culture because that is my roots, but the way I adopt it is my own way," she said. "I really want to get outside of religious boundaries. All religions are fundamentally the same thing: Love, compassion, sharing. In that way, I cannot judge one religion against another."

"I want the people to bring all the questions back to themselves. Who are you? You have those ancestors, that culture, that gift - how do you want to live? My challenge is to just let it happen. But one of my musicians already asked his father, 'What does 'ancestor' mean to our family?' So, it is already working."